Posts made by Arkandel

@crayon UberEats and whatnot have probably made a goddamn killing during the pandemic.

I prefer remote work. I didn't use to, but I do now.

The main reason is that despite it all, I have better control of my life.

I'm at home - that means I eat at home because I've access to my own kitchen. It means sparing 1.5-2+ hours of travel time per day simply commuting, which is huge. It means less wear and tear on my car plus a smaller chance for an accident; lots of tired, stressed, distracted drivers around at rush hour. Especially in the Canadian winter when the roads are icy and not everyone has proper tires on.

I'm also working from my own office, no one's staring over my shoulder (except my cat), no one bugs me while I work (except my dogs) and I can wear comfortable pants, fluffy slippers and no socks while I do it. I don't need to worry about walking into a terrible public bathroom situation, and if I need a shower after I'm done there's one waiting for me 5 minutes later. Hell, even brushing my teeth at lunch feels nice - having a toothbrush around at the office always felt... dirty to me.

Is it less social? Yeah, by far. Do I have a worst work/life balance sometimes since it sometimes feel I'm never quite off the clock? Yes.

@sunny In some sectors the cat is out of the bag. It's too late to demand a return to WFO, since basic rules of supply and demand will create a worker shortage. And those who do will find their employees seeking other options.

@kestrel said in RL things I love:

I actually hate the boots but I guess now I have to keep them forever.

This is like that Friends episode, Monica!

@aria said in The Work Thread:

I'm just angry because I can only imagine, with the timing of when his comments came in, that this guy spent the whole 90 minutes sitting there with his polemic all ready to go, just waiting for the survey to open so that he could shit all over

That sounds like a fairly reasonable assumption.

Have you seen videos of people who walk unmasked - but filming - into malls only to pick a fight with employees there about being unable to sit anywhere, being excluded, attacked, what about their children, etc?

This guy came in prepared to pick that fight. He probably knew how it would play out before you even started. I'd bet it'd have gone exactly the same way if you had catered 90% to Christmas over the remaining 10%. It's all for the spectacle.

Sadly it only serves to validate them at the cost of ruining some other person's day. I'm sorry you had to deal with that.

@aria If 699 people had fun, felt included, participated and appreciated the celebration but one person did not, that's still a 99.85% success rate.

... Hawkeye episode 5 was very good!

***=Spoilericious.***

Lord of the Rings is the number one trilly.

@rucket Yeah but that's not at all how season 1 went/has gone so far. Except for one episode I'd argue every other has focused half of its time on Moiraine's point of view. For example Perrin has gotten very little focus. Mat has barely done anything that gave the character a voice or agency. Rand is a bit bland although at this point in the books that's justified.

Nynaeve had more moments, mind you, although that's partly because of the actor's excellent chemistry with Lan's (which, to me, is one of the most promising parts of the show). And Egwene had last week's episode to shine a bit.

@kk said in Goodbye.:

I agree with a lot of this. Mushing takes not just a lot of time, but often a lot of emotional energy. It sometimes comes without a lot of building and growth.

I'll go a step further to claim that most hobbies are, by the nature of being such time-sinks, requiring hefty emotional investments.

When it comes to multiplayer games then another dimension is added that hinders growth; you aren't doing them alone. So leaving doesn't merely leave a hole in your life and habits but strips you of a social network you may have depended or relied on.

For example if you're into a solo habit the time consumption can certainly be there. Doing puzzles or gardening can take up many, many hours of your time. But should you decide to stop or cut back, hard as it might be, there is less of an impact.

Many 'social' hobbies, including but not limited to MU*ing, strip you of people you call friends if you stop participating. It's not just gaming; try to get out of being a hardcore local team fan. Or volunteering for something as part of a group.

Ultimately the real killer - for me - is the very human trait of expecting something back for the investment. It's pretty natural, isn't it? If we spend multiple hours a day doing something then on some level there's some emotional projection that we'll get something in return. With something like a MU* the only such thing is having fun while you're playing; and the call of whether it's worth it is a personal one.

But there's nothing inherently wrong with it. MU*ing isn't less 'worth it' than being a hardcore soccer fan, which millions of people are.

@tek Would you say the grave is no bar to MSB's call?

https://winteriscoming.net/2021/12/11/the-wheel-of-time-moiraine-problem-too-interesting-rosamund-pike

I kinda agree. Unless they are willing to pull a Ned Stark here, Moiraine isn't supposed to be the story's protagonist by any means.

And of course she's a more interesting characters than the others. She has much more screen time than the rest combined at least in this season.

@seraphim73 said in The Wheel of Time:

@derp said in The Wheel of Time:

People keep saying this is fridging. It’s not.

I disagree intensely with this statement. The death of Perrin's wife is absolutely fridging. TVTropes defines "Stuffed in the Fridge" as "A loved one is hurt, killed, maimed, assaulted, or otherwise traumatized in order to motivate another character or move their plot forward." That is 100% what happened to Perrin's wife. She was killed in order to traumatize Perrin and to make his choice between Hammer and Axe all the harder. That's like... the definition of fridging.

There's some speculation online (which I won't put behind spoiler tags since, after all, it's just a theory) that Perrin's wife was a darkfriend. This would possibly give some depth to what happened.

Would it change your mind if the plot device had more depth behind it than just her death?

@wildbaboons Except for especially the darkfriends.

@sunny I am really sorry for your loss.

@crayon Acshually...

***=Spoiler warning!***

By the way:

@runescryer said in The Wheel of Time:

@arkandel See, I don't disagree with your LoTR assessment. Cutting out the minor figures, fine. I did not miss Tom Bombadill cartwheeling on the screen. But, the other half is...where does it stop being an adaptation of someone's work and become the work of the adapter? For example...The Hobbit. Turning the book into a full trilogy caused so much filler material to be created and added, I felt it was more Peter Jackson's fan-fic than Tolkien's story. There's a point where you risk losing the core fans that are hyping up the story for the newcomers. This show just reached that point right off the bat, IMO, instead of taking 1 and a half to two films.

I hope you pardon the length of this rant, it's a favorite topic of mine.

There's a saying in sports, that winning conceals many problems. A team might have personal clashes, coaching problems, bad contracts... but as long as it wins those tend to be swept under the rug.

The Hobbit trilogy made several missteps. I definitely agree it stretched a long book into three movies so they had to add a lot of fillers in there to make it watchable, they introduced a love triangle, crammed a Council of the Wise versus the Nazgul scene and just a bunch of blue screened sequences that were probably closer to a video game than the Oscar-winning masterpieces the Lord of the Rings series amassed.

But here's the thing; the biggest sin The Hobbit committed was simply that it... wasn't good. Had it been good we might not have been talking about any of this. It didn't work - as simple as that.

And it wasn't because the fillers didn't belong canonically, either. For example Galadriel, Saruman, Gandalf and Elrond pushing The Necromancer out of Dol Guldur is documented - it happened in the book... even though that whole scene was originally just a line of dialogue. The Legolas love triangle was weird but I mean... there was no reason he wasn't around at the time, and if he was included then he needed something to do.

I think we're judging that by its results - it wasn't a great movie trilogy, and so the parts also failed.

It also has to do with expectations. When I sit to watch the Wheel of Time TV show I 'expect' it to more or less follow the books. Some adjustments are okay; major storylines being gutted would not be (and just to be clear, so far I don't have any such complaints - I seriously doubt they are changing who the Dragon Reborn is from the books).

As a different example of expectations though maybe look at Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. That video game uh, didn't... quite stick to the books. In fact it looked at the books, got drunk and possibly high then just kinda went "I wanna have swordfights with Orc captains, the fucking Nine , Balrogs and goddamn Shelob. And forge a Ring of Power. And also pull a Geist: the Sin-Eaters all over this". Then it did exactly that. I loved it!

Is that fair to demand from the producers? Because it's a high bar. "Sure, make a series. Don't make it too faithful or it will be boring to watch. But don't change it so much that it's too different. Make the material your own but don't write fan-fiction either. I want it to look like it's in my head. We all want it to look like it's in our collective heads. And it needs to work both for book readers and show-watchers."

No. But that's why they get paid the big bucks.

@rucket said in The Wheel of Time:

Anyway, I think Sanderson has made a good point elsewhere, that television and movies are a different animal than novels. I agree with this, and having seen adaptation after adaptation shit on source material I've enjoyed in the past...

Of course. Absolutely. There is no way the exposition alone from a series like the Wheel of Time could possibly fit within a TV series, even one with many more than just 8 episodes per season. We can't possible sit through the equivalent of hundreds of pages explaining how the One Power works, for example. That'd be downright impossible.

Nor would it be reasonable for any of us to not lose some favorite secondary book characters or subplots altogether. Even big plots. Merging either (or just plain skipping them) are just about par for the course. Sometimes it's just to save on costs; sets are expensive so if they aren't going to be reused, it makes every sense to cut down.

Even some indulgences are fine. I'm a purist Tolkien fan but I didn't mind (too much ) that Glorfindel was removed and Arwen put in his place, or even when they had that subplot about her fate being 'tied to Middle-Earth'. It's a'ight. Elves at Helms Deep? Okay, I can roll with it. Legolas' acrobatic fights? Okay, that's fine.

But - to use the same examples as above - it's one thing to have Arwen's role upgraded and another to replace Pippin and have her be in the Fellowship. It's okay to merge some Aes Sedai with similar political views, or to make the One Power way simpler without explaining almost any of it directly. They'll get to the same point; Nynaeve is like, very strong and she really is something special as a Healer. We don't need to be told what a Spirit weave is.

If they can pull the Lord of the Rings' equivalent of adopting the material with the Wheel of Time series I'll be more than happy.

They can depart from the original material; they just shouldn't go their separate ways, and I'll have a really good time with it.

@derp said in The Wheel of Time:

That would be like someone just giving up on G. R. R. M. if he writes something in his books different from what the HBO series went into, assuming that we ever get the others. That would be kind of silly, IMO.

I'll give you two reasons. Again, this is just a personal preference; I don't think people are terrible or anything for being okay with the same things I'm not.

So I'm fine with relatively departures which are perfectly plausible within the context of the original work (such as the relationship we saw today in WoT Ep 6). This didn't happen in the books but there was no reason that it couldn't have.

I'm also entirely fine with changes made to accommodate the story in the format it's being told. The most obvious example here is in Lord of the Rings where Tom Bombadil - an important but not strictly relevant-to-the-plot character was taken out entirely. It'd have added another good half hour to an already long movie - it was the right call to make.

On the other hand I wouldn't watch a Silmarillion series where Morgoth is killed by Beren. I wouldn't want to watch Lord of the Rings either where Saruman makes his own Ring of Power and the characters have to go take it from him. Either of those might make for a great fantasy movies - but it wouldn't be Tolkien. It'd be too different from the books for my tastes.

Now I'll put some spoiler tags and I'll explain my reasoning for the identity of the Dragon Reborn specifically.

***=You've been warned!***